New book: Inside the money wars

Outside groups poured a staggering $2.5 billion into the 2012 election — far more than the $1.6 billion spent by party committees — as power migrated from party honchos to a handful of billionaires and political consultants, according to a book released Tuesday by POLITICO Chief Investigative Reporter Kenneth P. Vogel.

Text Size

Why do politicians run from this guy?

* Liberal megadonors discussed funding a primary challenger to President Barack Obama in 2012 – perhaps then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – and attempted to commission a poll from a top Democratic pollster to see how she would do in the general election.

* Karl Rove, before leaving the White House, quietly advised a group called Freedom’s Watch, which raised $56 million ahead of the 2008 race, primarily from Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, and set the stage for Rove’s Crossroads groups.

* Even after the disappointing 2012 election, the Koch brothers political operation raised far more money at its first donor seminar of the 2014 cycle — $70 million — than it raised at the first seminar of the 2012 cycle: $49 million.

* Koch operatives conducted background checks on hotel waitstaff and collected smartphones, iPads and other electronics before many sessions at the first 2014 seminar, in Indian Wells, California.

* Obama, at a secret 2012 meeting with rich liberals, pledged to use his political capital in his second term to pursue a constitutional amendment to blunt the impacts of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision— a promise he has not pursued.

* Among the donors to the Democracy Alliance, an exclusive club of wealthy, politically active liberals founded in part by billionaire financier George Soros is a wealthy sitting member of Congress, Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida.

The book comes as billionaires continue to pour millions into the 2014 midterms, fueling a GOP civil war in the primaries, and prompting 2016 hopefuls to make pilgrimages across the country to meet with megadonors in an effort to secure their early backing. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is also expected to bring a constitutional amendment, intended to curb the flow of big money in politics, to the floor, but that effort is largely for messaging purposes and not expected to go anywhere.

Megadonors on both sides of the aisle are increasingly exploring the extent of the power that accompanies their ability to spend unlimited sums to influence American elections.

Democratic donors who were unhappy with Obama, like Utah-based hedge-fund magnate Art Lipson, were willing to fund a primary challenger to the president in the aftermath of the party’s losses in the 2010 election. “If there had been a halfway decent challenger, I definitely would have supported him. And that’s just halfway decent,” Lipson told Vogel, according to the book.

Another major Democratic donor, San Francisco lawyer Guy Saperstein, tried to enlist Clinton’s 2008 pollster Geoff Garin to poll how Clinton would fare against Obama in a 2012 general election versus different Republican candidates. Garin declined and eventually ended up working for the pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA.

The book traces efforts to coax reluctant liberal megadonors off the sidelines, including the use of a spreadsheet that 2012 Obama campaign manager Jim Messina and his staff created. A resulting chart, which Messina dubbed “Storm of Spending,” showed estimates of how much the major outside groups on both sides would raise.

“It was intended to scare,” said someone familiar with Messina’s presentation, “to get people to donate more than they had come to that meeting hoping to spend.”

Ultimately, it took only 4,600 big donors to match the $500 million contributed to Obama, Romney and their allied groups by 8 million small donors. In other words, in a presidential campaign that centered on the question of who would better represent the middle class, the top 0.04 percent of donors gave about as much as the bottom 68 percent.